MONTREAL — On Monday night, Canada’s ruling Conservative Party lost ground in all three by-elections. It barely held onto Calgary Centre, a party stronghold for decades. Its share of the vote went down in Durham, just east of Toronto. And in Victoria, its candidate received a meagre 14 per cent of the vote.

Yet after contemplating these results, the happiest politician in the land may be Stephen Harper.

Why? Because the results gave each of the opposition parties something to boast about. The Greens dramatically increased their vote in both Calgary Centre and Victoria, where they came close to toppling the NDP, who have held the seat for the past six years. The NDP succeeded in holding onto Victoria and saw their share of the vote rise in Durham. And the Liberals nearly stole Calgary Centre from the Conservatives, even though right-of-centre parties have won every seat in the entire city of Calgary since 1972.

The result, once again, is stalemate in the opposition. Elizabeth May, Tom Mulcair and interim Liberal leader Bob Rae are free to reassure their troops that they’re marching toward victory in the 2015 federal election.

They know better, of course. They just can’t admit it.

The truth is that although a large majority of Canadians voted against the Conservatives in 2011, and dislike the extreme pro-corporate, anti-environment policies of the current government, Stephen Harper is on track for another majority. Harper won the last election with less than 40 per cent of the vote, and even if his party’s share drops by a few points in 2015, he could easily gain a further mandate.

The problem is the split opposition. Look at what happened on Monday in Calgary Centre. The Conservative candidate, Joan Crockatt, scraped by with just 37 per cent of the vote. Together, the Greens and the Liberals outpolled her by far. In Durham, the NDP would have had a fighting chance of unseating the Tories if they had enjoyed support from Liberals and Greens.

Can anything be done about this fragmentation? The political elite seems convinced that it can’t. “No one hates Canadian Liberals more than the competitors to their left,” writes Robin Sears in the current Literary Review of Canada. (As a former national director of the NDP, he should know.) Likewise, “most Canadian Liberals have understood that they are bleeding to the left, not to the Conservatives. And, as they make vehemently clear in every campaign, they resent it mightily.”

Knowing his political history, Sears believes a marriage between progressive parties is unlikely — though he ends up wistfully admitting that “the time has come.”

I wonder. In this year’s NDP leadership election, the surprise force was a previously unknown MP from rural B.C., Nathan Cullen, who ran a strong third after promoting a pre-election alliance among his own party, the Greens and the Liberals. NDP members responded warmly to Cullen’s message of hope and unity. Thousands of them proved willing, even eager to put some water in their wine.

Today we’re in the early stages of a Liberal leadership race. Will any of the aspirants dare to take up Cullen’s challenge? Conventional wisdom says it would be political suicide for one of the main candidates to advocate an alliance with the NDP and the Greens – despite the obvious fact that the Liberals are now just a third party, so weak in most of Quebec and Western Canada that they have no realistic hope of winning a majority in 2015.

But conventional wisdom can be wrong. When Stephen Harper led his Canadian Alliance into a merger with Peter MacKay’s Progressive Conservatives in 2003, several commentators expressed doubt about the arrangement, saying the governing Liberals had no reason to worry. True, some prominent members of both right-of-centre parties agonized about the merger. None of them is complaining now.

Hardcore New Democrats, lifelong Liberals and fervent Greens have their differences, of course. But they share a host of values and beliefs, as well as a growing despair with the ideologically driven policies of the current government. What’s needed now is for enough members of all three parties to step forward and demand a pre-election alliance.

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